shair

Saturday, 4 February 2012

Correct use of keywords in the title of every page of your website is important to Google – particularly for the home page. If you do nothing else to optimize your site, do this!

The "Keywords" META tag is ignored by Google. Concentrate your efforts on the
title for each page, making sure they contain the best keywords for the content of
each page.

The title shouldn’t consist of much more than about 9 words or 60 characters, with
your keywords used toward the beginning of the title. Since Google is looking for
relevant keywords in the title, this means you should NOT include your company
name in the title unless your company name is so well known as to be a keyword in
it’s own right with instant name recognition – like Disney, Nike, or Yahoo. If you must
include your company name in the title, put it at the end. In addition, each page title
should be unique – don’t duplicate titles on pages.

Improper or nonexistent use of titles in web pages keep more websites out of
top rankings on Google than any other factor except for a lack of quality links
from other websites that point to your site.

The following table shows both the improper and proper use of titles for a website
that sells house plans. You undoubtedly have seen numerous websites that use
“Home” as the title of their home page. Google may think these sites are about
homes!

Web page Improper Title Proper Title

Home page “Home” “Unique house plans, home plans & home
designs”

Contact page “Contact us” “Contact us for questions about our house plans”

About page “About us” “We are all about house plans”

Links page “Links” “Links to more information about house plans”

As you can see, you should use relevant keywords in every title of every page of
your site. Most people get this wrong. Do a search for “Welcome to”, “Home”, “Home
page”, “Untitled Document”, or “index.html” and you’ll see what I mean about
incorrect use of TITLE text.